Simplicity is not virginal in the modern world. She has a penitential or
a vidual singleness. We can conceive an antique world in which life,
art, and letters were simple because of the absence of many things; for
us now they can be simple only because of our rejection of many things.
We are constrained to such a vigilance as will not let even a master's
work pass unfanned and unpurged. Even among his phrases one shall be
taken and the other left. For he may unawares have allowed the
habitualness that besets this multitudinous life to take the pen from his
hand and to write for him a page or a word; and habitualness compels our
refusals. Or he may have allowed the easy impulse of exaggeration to
force a sentence which the mere truth, sensitively and powerfully
pausing, would well have become. Exaggeration has played a part of its
own in human history. By depreciating our language it has stimulated
change, and has kept the circulating word in exercise. Our rejection
must be alert and expert to overtake exaggeration and arrest it. It
makes us shrewder than we wish to be. And, indeed, the whole endless
action of refusal shortens the life we could desire to live. Much of our
resolution is used up in the repeated mental gesture of adverse decision.
Our tacit and implicit distaste is made explicit, who shall say with what
loss to our treasury of quietness? We are defrauded of our interior
ignorance, which should be a place of peace. We are forced to confess
more articulately than befits our convention with ourselves. We are
hurried out of our reluctances. We are made too much aware. Nay, more:
we are tempted to the outward activity of destruction; reviewing becomes
almost inevitable. As for the spiritual life--O weary, weary act of
refusal! O waste but necessary hours, vigil and wakefulness of fear! 'We
live by admiration' only a shortened life who live so much in the
iteration of rejection and repulse. And in the very touch of joy there
hides I know not what ultimate denial; if not on one side, on the other.
If joy is given to us without reserve, not so do we give ourselves to
joy. We withhold, we close. Having denied many things that have
approached us, we deny ourselves to many things. Thus does _il gran
rifiuto_ divide and rule our world.
Simplicity is worth the sacrifice; but all is not sacrifice. Rejection
has its pleasures, the more secret the more unmeasured. When we garnish
a house we refuse more furniture, and furniture more various, than might
haunt the dreams of decorators. There is no limit to our rejections. And
the unconsciousness of the decorators is in itself a cause of pleasure to
a mind generous, forbearing, and delicate. When we dress, no fancy may
count the things we will none of. When we write, what hinders that we
should refrain from Style past reckoning? When we marry--. Moreover, if
simplicity is no longer set in a world having the great and beautiful
quality of fewness, we can provide an equally fair setting in the quality
of refinement. And refinement is not to be achieved but by rejection.
One who suggests to me that refinement is apt to be a mere negative has
offered up a singular blunder in honour of robustiousness. Refinement is
not negative, because it must be compassed by many negations. It is a
thing of price as well as of value; it demands immolations, it exacts
experience. No slight or easy charge, then, is committed to such of us
as, having apprehension of these things, fulfil the office of exclusion.
Never before was a time when derogation was always so near, a daily
danger, or when the reward of resisting it was so great. The simplicity
of literature, more sensitive, more threatened, and more important than
other simplicities, needs a guard of honour, who shall never relax the
good will nor lose the good heart of their intolerance.